William Jennings Bryan threatened to run as an independent if free silver wasn’t put into the Democratic platform. Free silver was put into the 1900 Democratic platform by a one-vote margin. In this timeline that vote changes and the Democratic party rifts into two factions. Bryan dies during a winter accident in 1904 prolonging the rift while allowing the Bourbon faction to gain more influence. Meanwhile, the Republican party would run an "anti-corruption" campaign against the Democratic political machines that controlled many northern cities such as Tammany Hall. This was really an excuse to eliminate their chief rivals, but with the absence of the political machines, many of the urban poor who depended on their patronage were left without support as the Republicans, in their infinite wisdom, refused to replace those support networks with nothing. Which left a vacuum that would be filled by third parties such as the Socialists.
With the Democratic Party in tatters, Theodore Roosevelt wins the 1912 election as a Progressive candidate. His entry into the first world war fractures his party as many of them were isolationists who already accused him of not being a true Progressive but only using the party for his own agenda. With the death of Roosevelt and the defeat of Hiram Johnson against Fairbanks in 1920, the Progressive Party disbanded with many either going to the Democrats or Socialist parties.
Fairbanks worked to undo much of the social programs that Roosevelt had passed which quickly made him unpopular. Only made worse when members of his cabinet became involved with the Teapot Dome scandal. His unpopularity nearly cost him the 1924 election and was only saved when the Democratic candidate, Charles W. Bryan, agreed to give his delegates to Fairbanks in exchange for cabinet positions for his people and to deny victory to La Follette and his Progressive-Socialist Alliance party. Many Democrats were inflamed by Bryan's betrayal, most notably William Randolph Hearst who in his bitterness over the defeat and paranoia of communism, increasingly took radical strongman positions inspired by Benito Mussolini.
It was with this platform that Hearst took over the Democratic party and narrowly win the 1928 election through the electoral collage despite losing the popular vote. But rhetoric alone proved ineffective against the stock market crash in 1929 and the following Great Depression. With his policies failing to improve the economy he increasingly resorted to authoritarian tactics to maintain power. Despite this, Hearst still lost the 1932 election to the Progressive-Socialist candidate Eugene Debs, and the Democratic party was set to lose its majority. This drove Hearst beyond the pale and instead of conceding he attempted a self-coup of his government. His plan was to arrest the opposition and declare martial law. But he only succeeded in capturing Debs while Congress fled the capitol. He also found that many in the military had Socialist sympathies and refused to recognize his orders. With only his paramilitary loyalists and the Governors of South Carolina and Alabama recognizing his authority, Hearst dug in the capitol and a week-long siege that became known as the November Revolution. The crisis ended with Hearst's capture but not before the ex-president had brutally executed Debs.
To prevent this from happening again, a national convention was held in an emergency session of congress. They adopted a new constitution that reduced the executive branch to a figurehead, combined the Senate and House into one body, put term limits on the Supreme Court Justices, established the US Constabulary (popularly known as Rangers) as a gendarmerie force, moved the capitol to a new city to be constructed in Wyoming named Debs City, and abolished prohibition.
The European powers reacted with alarm to this development as it seemed the Americans fell to a communist regime. Neville Chamberlin refused to recognize the new government and enacted the Imperial Preference tariff in the British Empire and stopped paying WWI debts to the new US regime. Tensions were high as the British feared an invasion of Canada during the heightened tensions in Europe due to the concurrent rise of Hitler.
The new US government was a de-facto parliamentary republic and the first leader to emerge from the still evolving body was Huey Long who established the Speaker of the House as the head of government by employing the tactics he honed as the governor of Louisiana. He was a controversial figure in the socialist party, but his reforms were popular and despite his critics concerns of him becoming another Hearst or Stalin, they did not want to plunge the US into turmoil when many Americans desired stability and were still reeling from the tramatic events of November. During this time, the US was effectively a one-party state but only because the Democrats were shattered and the Republicans were so impotent that a non-Socialist government would only unseat them thirty years later. Long had isolationist tendencies in regard to Europe and felt contempt after the Twilight War which saw the fall of France and Britain signing an embarrassing white peace with Germany. But his views changed as conflict in China escalated and threatened the Philippines, he ceased selling oil to the Japanese to stop their aggression in China.
The Germans launched operation Barbarossa against the USSR in 1941, the British having spent a year rearming, declared war on Germany in support of the USSR. A year later, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and drew Socialist America into the Second World War. The war lasted in Europe until 1945 and saw the downfall of Hitler and the Nazi's, but the war in Japan would drag on after the failure of the American Operation Overlord. Speaker Long wouldn't live to see its end as he died from liver failure and was replaced by Norman Thomas. Speaker Thomas sought negotiations rather than repeat Overlord, and his pacifist ethics excluded the use of experimental weapons that wouldn't be ready until 1946 anyway. The Japanese agreed to a conditional surrender that stripped them of most of their territory except for Taiwan, south Sakhalin, and other islands.
Thomas worked against Long's style of Socialism and favored implementing more orthodox Marxist policies and ceasing the authoritarianism that featured heavily in Long's administration. He also sought to retreat from Europe after the war by reunifying Germany as a neutral state. But his idealism backfired as Stalin kept his forces in Eastern Europe and he became a new aggressor to the American public. Thomas reversed his initial position and sent financial aid to Britain and France albeit reluctantly.
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Years later, Americans became tired of decades of Socialist leadership. The Liberal-Republican Coalition had finally won enough seats in Congress to form a government, electing the popular Joseph F. Kennedy Jr. to the Speakership with Bill Nixon as his chief deputy. His first challenge is the discovery of Soviet warheads in the Dominican Republic and Speaker Kennedy contemplates warning the Soviets with nuclear demonstrations in New Mexico of the missiles the Americans currently have stationed in Turkey.
